VOTE THE LESSER

Ralph Nader got a lot of mileage out of his "evil of the two lessers" quip in the 2000 run for President. This was, of course, because of the tired old complaint that we are always being forced to vote for the lesser of two evils, as though that was a bad thing.

But wait a minute. That is precisely the proper stance to take when choosing between two candidates or among many candidates. That is, if we insist on using a voting system at all. It's like this, one should first ascertain they are all evil. This won't be too hard, you'll find. And by evil here is clearly meant unworthy, unqualified, or in some way unfit to hold the office. This initial effort might place a considerable burden on the voter in that one must learn all there is to know about the duties and the potential of the office and also read or listen to a all the candidate has had to say on any matter pertaining to these duties and potentials. And a good study of history wouldn't hurt either If the voter is diligent in these studies I am sure he will find all candidates unfit and he can begin the hard work of judging the least fit, the next least fit and so on. Unfortunately, I believe I am only talking about an ideal here, as the voters and pundits I observe seldom work this hard at selecting their politicians. But we all can learn.

Looking at it a different way, it is essential we do not vote for the most dangerous candidate, and so must above all ferret out the degree of danger each candidate represents. Moving up through the list we naturally arrive at the least dangerous. And then he or she is the least evil and our rational choice.

CAN WE SKIP THE PRAYER?

Prayer is a tool for brainwashing that is second to none. No one is expected by the
faithful to pray only once. Whenever we want something we are expected to pray for it. Whenever we like what happens we are expected to give a prayer of thanks. No, we are not supposed to ask why things happen. We are to accept the nonsense that someone named God is responsible for all good things. And if I repeat enough prayers, as I did in my naive youth, I'm apt to believe there is such a thing as God - a sort of self hypnosis. But I say count me out..

City of Spokane Reorganization

Spokane's political structure has recently been changed after what was perceived by many as a disastrous crash of the the city manager form. It was said that the new strong mayor system would be more more accountable.But believe me, in a few years a similar crisis will develop, and a cry will go out for another system. There are only three or four forms of city government now in use throughout the country and two of these will have already been used by Spokane. So it can not hurt to have another option
.
I propose a radical reorganization. The new system would eliminate the growing influence of monied interests, empower more citizens, and be more efficient. And if the basic philosophy of this new system should take hold and expand, the city government as we have thought of it could disappear. A good thing. What follows is an outline. The actual transition would take place in stages and after much public negotiation among the citizens

This proposal would put into practice some ideas developed by the Australian philosopher John Burnheim in his book Is Democracy Possible? The first of his two key ideas is to set the basic units of governance into functional units rather than geographical units. The second is to select those who set the policy of these basic units by lot from a population who have an actual interest or stake in the function rather than simply being interested. The upshot of this would be governance by negotiation among representatives of a class of stake holders rather than governance by an unstable collection of power seekers. Burnheim calls this system demarchy.


Spokan' is usually thought of as being run by a council and a mayor. The council serves as a legislative and quasi-judicial body and the mayor heads up an executive branch as he oversees the police, public works, and so forth. Anyway, this is the view which gets our attention because the mayor and council members are the only elected "city" officials.. Though, remember that district 81 school board members are elected. This education system is independent of what we think of as the city government but education is certainly a local public good as important as our streets, parks and public safety. So right away we have an example of Burnheim's functional unit, though still suffering somewhat from electoral politics and without as much autonomy as possible, being beholden in several areas to Olympia and even the federal government... But do you see? We have no need for a mayor or council to meddle with the school district .

And furthermore, there are many other people, though all unelected, making decisions on our public life, under varying degrees of review by the elected officials. First, we have a partially independent park board with a budget as a fixed percentage of the overall budget; and periodically, calls are made to change this board from an appointed body to an elected body. Then we have the planning commission and library board. In fact, there are over twenty city boards and commissions. Members of these sometimes shadowy bodies are appointed by the mayor and council from a pool of volunteers

Now, why do we have these boards and commissions? It is because the elected officials do not have the expertise or time to make all the required decisions on their own. No one council member or the mayor can have at the ready the same knowledge of facts and conditions as a planning commission member and a park board member and a human rights commission member and a police commission member and a library board member and on and on. Such true generalists are just too few and far between, and precious few if any of those that do exist are being elected. Perhaps we can do away with the need for such pretenders.

Where shall we start? Let's try the police department and consider a public safety board to oversee the running of the police department -- no Mayor or city Council. I believe the ideal here would be to parallel the public education sector, A law or constitutional amendment would be passed in Olympia placing an obligation on the state to provide public safety for city residents. Of course, like with the education system, the money provided would be far short of what is needed and the board would need to ask the public to vote on regular and special levies. But short of that ideal, let us say we simply cut the police department out from under the mayor and council and place it under the governance of a police board. On the board there could be a judge, a defense attorney, a local activist with a history of being affected by crime, three citizens from a area of high crime, and two citizens from an area of moderate crime. This board would be the sole local policy making body as to the city's police department. They would be selected by lot from a list of volunteers in such a way as to be a representative cross section of those with the most material interest in the operation of the police.

DOWN WITH THE PEOPLE

The will of the people is often claimed as a political consideration. The meaning of this will of the people expression requires a closer look to see of it makes sense on its face. And the same can be said about a government by the people or for the people. I don't believe these notions exist in the sense we are expected to believe they do; it is not reasonable to imagine any group having a will, a wish or a desire, excepting quite rare circumstances. In what follows I hope to give am understanding as to how attributions of such notions to the "people" are misleading..

It has become a widespread practice to use nonsensical statements such as butchered aphorisms and incorrect words to express underlying ideas only partly or incorrectly understood by the writer or (more usually) the speaker. A common example of this is when one needs to say "Time will tell," and they actually say "The proof is in the pudding." This latter piece of nonsense is clearly a misstatement of the old remark " The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Sometimes a feeble defense is made that we are simply dealing here with a contraction of the correct statement. I don't think so. Anyway, the ubiquitous use of "people" in political discourse could be said to fall into this general category of misuse. But the consequences of such sloppy thinking in the arena of politics are much more serious than in our everyday life.

Let us start with two clear thinking and independent citizens picked at random in my city or yours and consider this small collection as the people. Now, as these two look out upon the vast range of those possible changes to their life and its enjoyment which lie within the power of the state to effect, just what are their shared wills? Note that as they each become more particular, at some point it is almost certain they will not share wills; but if their will is general enough, they are quite likely to share it. Though I dislike slowing matters down here with too many obvious examples, let's consider this. In the former instance above, each could wish a different type of park in their shared neighborhood. In the latter instance, each could wish for a park. Beginning to see the picture?

We do have the experience of things like mass hysteria, mass hypnotism, and phenomena bordering on these. Think of crowds at sporting events and prayer meetings. But we can come back to these at the end and see how they fit in.

Now, even in the provision of a quite general public good, our two citizens may go their separate ways as the options for details of its delivery are brought to light, But perhaps they won't. So let us say that here with just two persons we could have an unlikely example of a people sharing a will. But now let us begin to add citizens at random to our band. Look at a group of three, four, and on and on. Is the likelihood of a common will getting greater? Clearly not. Experience tells us that as the numbers grow, differences spring up. As we reach a decent sized citizenry the only chance we seem to be left with is for some such thing as a common will to live - and we know that even that is not universal. You name it: liberty, wealth, health, or whatever. Not everyone of a decent sized population wills it, so there is no will of the people in the sense of unanimity Hence, such sentiments are a very poor foundation upon which to lay a theory of governance. Of course, an immediate objection is to assert that it is not unanimity but overwhelming majority that is being referred to. But what is overwhelming? Exactly. An issue which can not be resolved with any certainty.

Some say democracy as majority rule is a bully boy system. And by talking a lot about we the people and government by the people and for the people the bullies can pull the wool over our eyes. Those rule who have the money, the power, the chicanery, or whatever it takes at the time. Do they make the dissenters suffer as much as they could? Not usually. But only because they don't welcome a fight to the death. They might lose. Anyway, that is one view.

Another more temperate view is that it is a harmless game where we all agree with the rule that a majority of some sort rules. We make our play, and if we come up short in the voting, we pull ourselves together until the next election and act as good citizens because "the people" have spoken. This is justified as a tit for tat system. The outs suffer along for a time and then they become the ins. This system more or less defines the political process as being run by two less than zealous groups, swinging back and forth over a number of years between basically moderate candidates.

In neither of the above two views can it be said the people are represented because, as was shown above our experience tells us there no such thing as a single will of the people. But there is a further sense in which the notion of people does mischief.

In practice the people are always the British, the Cubans, the American people. There are boundaries. But many problems are global and so a government by the people and for the people can be conceived coherently only as government by all existing human beings in the long term interests of the human race and the world that it dominates. A clearly out of reach goal.

So, as sad as it might make us, we must find a way to leave this mode of thought, a mode which tempts us to set our reason aside and give credence to those in politics who speak of such things as the people. Let us leave such expressions to those who characterize mobs and others in mass frenzies.

endnote: A closely related problem is the loose way in which people of cities and nations are said to have one character or another.